Give Your Sense of Taste and Smell A Workout

Maybe it's not just about giving your body a workout after the holidays. Something that might be a little more enjoyable is improving your sense of smell and taste with practice. Why? To help with your wine enjoyment, of course, but also with anything else you consume.

Background

Most of what you "taste" is actually smell. You know this because when you have a cold and your nose is stuffed you can't taste anything. 

What you actually taste with your mouth is pretty rudimentary; sweet, salty, savory, acid/bitter, savory, and most of these are actually with your tongue. 

What goes from the sensors in your nose to the olfactory part of your brain is more complicated. Not everybody has a great sense of smell, it can be changed by disease, age, and probably other things we don't fully understand. Your sense of smell is actually affected by your memories (smells stick with you longer than your other senses). Can you still remember the smell of grandma's house when she was cooking? Things like that.

Wine Training

So the first thing to know is that everybody doesn't smell everything the same. So with wine, for example, because someone picks out peaches and apricots when smelling a wine and you get caramel and apples doesn't make one of you wrong.

There is something called a Wine Wheel (you can Google it) and there are wine training classes. The classes help you decipher the odors, teach you what to expect from different wines, and where the odors come from (could be from wood barrels, the grapes, added chemicals such as sulfur), age, or faults (such as corked, cooked, oxidized). Yeah, it can seem a bit complicated, but like with any training you start with the basics.

If your favorite wine is chardonnay, for example, look up what the typical smells are to a chardonnay and see what you get. What a few minutes and try it again. Yeah, it'll probably be different and that's expected. This is how you train yourself to pick out what is generally found in a chardonnay: could be apple, citrus, tropical fruits, vanilla, butterscotch, nutmeg, and more. The characteristics will be different between parts of the world the wines come from, regions within a country, wineries, and the vintage year. Oh yeah, and by the serving temperature of the wine.

The next steps are to figure out which of these you like, let's say more green apple crispy or more tropical fruity. Then start to note what shouldn't be there in a chard or any wine. See this for main wine flaws.

For me

For instance, sometimes in an unoaked (no barrels used) chardonnay I get an unpleasant metallic flavor. Some people may not pick that up, some may like it.

Wine can have main aromas, let's say red cherries in a zinfandel. But a wine is more complex because there are other things going on. In a zin that might be peppery, cinnamon, or other fruits such as raspberry. I prefer wines with these underlying characteristics and not just a blast of fruit. But that's just me; you'll figure out what you like best.

Yeah, this will be more fun than lifting weights or running two miles. Trust me.